Christmas in Chorlton, circa 1989 and a quest for a special toy

Raphael

Anyone with children born in the 1980s will remember the desperate hunt to collect the four Ninja Turtle figures.

I can’t remember which Christmas it was but the quest to find all four pretty much occupied the run up to the day.

The four and you had to try and collect all four were Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael and shops just couldn’t keep pace with the demand.

It was I suppose not unlike the stories my mum told about food rationing in the last war.

The rumour would circulate that one of the four was available from a certain toy shop and the race was on.

I remember there was an informal agreement that if you were out and you struck gold you bought as many as you could so that they could be shared out.

I am sure Quarmby's did their best but it was the big stores who offered the best chance of success.

Our eldest managed to get all four and in the way these things work all have now been lost.  But we do have a replica which came into the house a few Christmases ago for another of the lads.

It is Raphael who apparently was the bad boy of the team, being aggressive and sarcastic.

On a more pleasant note we still have mountains of Lego which once formed ships, castles, space rockets and pirate islands, now sadly reduced to their parts, kept in bin bags and waiting for something to happen.

But these were the toys of the 1980s and 90s when the boys were growing up.

Mud in 1974

Go back another decade and I could have picked space hoppers, scalextric, my little pony along with groups like the Bay City Rollers and Mud but I won’t.

Between them Mud and the Bay City Rollers divided the girls I taught and for a few years the school Christmas parties were dominated by alternating hit singles played out on an old record player  linked by a series of tired looking cables to the sound system which was already twenty years old and feeling its age.

These were the years when I had just become a responsible adult, had got married and was buying a house in Ashton Under-Lyne.

It would be a full ten years before I began pondering on wish lists and children’s toys.

That said I never quite lost my fascination for toys and in particular train sets, but that is for another time.

So given that I wandered into to that decade when my  sons were growing up I shall leave you with yet another image of Raphael and call a halt on all these Christmas postings.

Pictures; model of Raphael, Ninja Mutant Turtle from the collection of Josh Simpson, picture of Mud in 1974 from Wikipedia Commons, Beeld En Geluid Wiki - Gallerie: Toppop 1974, Author, AVRO

One canal …… 18 pictures ……. 45 or so years ago …… walking the Rochdale in 1979

 A short series bringing together for the first time pictures I took walking the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.

Most have appeared before but not together in the order in which I walked the Canal back in 1979.

But given my memory and my total failure to make notes of each shot at the time I took them some may well be out of sync.

Back then the canal was still in a shabby state and despite the work of restoration there was still an air of decay, which was added to by the state of the buildings which stood along its path.

Many had seen better days, a few were derelict waiting for something to happen, and since I walked the walk some have been demolished and some have been renovated.

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One canal …18 pictures ,walking the Rochdale Canal in 1979, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 18 ........... Christmas 1958

This is the continuing story of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

Actually it would be another six years before we celebrated Christmas in Well Hall, but why spoil a story?

The weather was less than promising with the Manchester Guardian on Christmas Eve, reporting that it would be “A Very Murky Christmas” with “Fog forecast for much of England and Wales [and] airports closed”.

Going on to comment “Fog to-day, fog to-morrow (though perhaps less) on Boxing Day are the possibilities for the Christmas Holidays in many parts of England and Wales.

Fog yesterday was a certainty,; it affected about thirty counties,  It covered nearly twenty thousand square miles stretching from Bournemouth to Durham.  It closed Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool airports and last night was seriously upsetting flights into London Airport.”.

But we were not planning to travel far.

Which leaves me trying to remember how we spent our Christmas that year.  I would have been nine my twin sisters just two and a bit and our Jill still a baby.

As happened every year Uncle George would have travelled up from the west country a few days earlier and the day would have unfolded with the presents, breakfast and a walk to Peckham Rye and back, before Christmas dinner and followed by a mix of the telly and board games, of which Monopoly was dominated every Christmas evening.

Like many families we had bought into a television during the 1950s, and while I no longer know when our first one arrived, by 1958 it was an established item.

So that Christmas on BBC we had a series of films, along with variety shows and a ghost tale, which was pretty much replicated by London ITV and Granada.

Setting aside the television that Christmas drew heavily on the traditions experienced by my parents, both of whom were born in the first decades of the last century.

There were still  a mix of oranges and nuts in the Christmas stockings which for us were pillow covers, and 1958 might well have been the first year that coloured lights replaced real candles on the tree, although it would be many years before the paper chains and bright paper trees were done away with.

But as ever the bright but fragile glass baubles survived well into the 1980s and were brought out as they had been done every year, with a few additions to take the place of the broken ones.

As for presents, mine were as traditional as they had been each year, with an addition to the train set, an Eagle Annual and an assortment of sweets.

And while I can’t now remember exactly what those presents were I know that the Eagle Annual was number eight and that the lead story was Dan Dare in Operation Moss.

All of which I think is enough.

Location; Well Hall

Pictures; Christmas decorations; from the collection of Catherine Obi, bought at Oxfam, and the Eagle Annual Number 8, with an extract from Operation Moss

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall

**“A Very Murky Christmas”, Manchester Guardian, December 24th, 1958

Christmas Eve with the Eagle

Christmas Eve with the Eagle

The Eagle always celebrated Christmas by decorating the main panel.



Location; Christmas



Picture, Eagle, Vol 6. No. 51 December 23, 1955, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Eltham we have lost, part 3........ Making hay a rick at Lyme Farm

Another of those pictures of Eltham’s past which need no comment

This was  Lyme Farm as the labourers were constructing a hay rick in 1909.

Later I the month I think I will return to Lyme Farm and explore its history and some of the people who lived and worked there.


Picture; making hay a rick at Lyme Farm from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

One canal …… 18 pictures ……. 45 or so years ago .......... walking the Rochdale in 1979

 A short series bringing together for the first time pictures I took walking the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.*

Most have appeared before but not together in the order in which I walked the Canal back in 1979.

But given my memory and my total failure to make notes of each shot at the time I took them some may well be out of sync.

Back then the canal was still in a shabby state and despite the work of restoration there was still an air of decay, which was added to by the state of the buildings which stood along its path.

Many had seen better days, a few were derelict waiting for something to happen, and since I walked the walk some have been demolished and some have been renovated.

Once you had walked underneath St James’s Building and Oxford Road you had a clear waljk down the canal as far as the bridge which carried Albion Street into town.

Today this section is flanked with modern buildings but in 1979, the walk took you past a heap of warehouses and factories dating from the 19th century and offered up fine views of the Refuge Building.

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One canal …18 pictures ,walking the Rochdale Canal in 1979, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

 

Looking for stories ………. from one house in Chorlton

Now, it has become popular to take a pretty ordinary house and trace its story back in time.

The house, 1959

I have to confess it is something I have done with three of the houses I have lived in over the last seventy years, and more recently the idea has become a successful television series.*

All of which is an introduction to Bamburh House on High Lane.

It featured yesterday on the blog when I began to explore its history.

And I have returned today with part two.  It was to be the story of some of the domestic servants who toiled away in the background rarely recognized, but essential to the well being of the family who employed them.

The idea was partly prompted by my own interest in those “who toiled”, and also from a comment by Sarah, the present owner that “When we bought the house we opened up the attics and there was a bedroom for a maid up there. 

I will dig out the pictures just for your interest because although the staircase carried up to her room she would’ve had to bend  double to get under the roof to enter”.

But as so often happens their stories are harder to piece together, and despite an afternoon wandering the records the four I chose led almost nowhere.

I had started in 1871 when the house was built, with a Miss Taylor aged 23, and young Agnes who was just 14 and employed as a “nurse”, but the enumerator’s handwriting was almost undecipherable, and my best shots led nowhere.

And while a decade later I could at least identify a Sarah A Edwards and John Strawbridge, they too remain in the shadows.

High Lane, 1881, the house marked with an X

Still there are plenty more to look for, and in time I will go looking.

All of which leaves me falling back on the house and exploring a little bit more of its past, which begins with an interesting mystery concerning John Strawbridge who in 1881 is described as a groom, suggesting the then owners had a horse and carriage.  Maps of the period show outbuildings behind the house on the west side, but later census returns make no reference to a groom.

The last census records that in 1911 Mr. Robert Newberry West, who was a surgeon, employed Elizabeth Parker as “cook-domestic” who was charged with maintaining the elven rooms and cooking for Mr. West, his mother and his two siblings.

The house, 1881, marked with an X

I have to say I have been drawn to Robert West, partly because he was born  in Camberwell,  close to where I was born and grew up in south east London and because we can track his progress from London to Chorlton-on Medlock where his father was the vicar at St Stephens and on to Southport where he lived with his widowed mother.  

He married in 1920 at the grand old age of 47, living on Upper Chorlton Road and finally Barlow Moor Road where he died in 1924.

Nor is that quite the end of the story, because like many bigger properties in south Manchester,  Bamburh House finally succumbed to multi occupancy.

Just when this happened is unclear.  

In 1929 the directories show that it was occupied by the Morris family, but a decade later the house was divided in to five flats of which two were unoccupied.  The remaining three were occupied by a sales manager and sales assistant, neither of whom were married, and Mr. and Mrs. Bond and their young daughter. Mr. John Bond was a sales manager for a tobacco and drugs company, his wife Doris was “an assistant hospital nurse” and Rita, their daughter was just 2 years old.

After which the house continued its long association with multi occupancy.  In 1954 it was home to three tenants, and in 1962 to four, and it remained so until Sarah bought the property and returned it to family use, which of course has been a trend across Chorlton.

With thanks to Sarah for allowing me to profile her house and Tony Petrie who supplied the street directories for 1929, 1959, and 1962.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

The house, 1956

Pictures; the house in 1959, A. E. Landers, m17886, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass High Lane in 1881, from the 1881 Withinton Board of Health map, courtesy Trafford Local Studies Centre, https://www.artuk.org/visit/venues/trafford-local-studies-centre-6551 and in 1956 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1956

*The story of a house, 

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall 

The story of one house in Lausanne Road, 

The house on Harrow Road in Leicester,